It is about the colonial apartheid system as it then operated, the convulsions that accompanied its destructions and the ensuing struggle to create what had not been there before. The origins of the book lie in the Children's ward of what was then the Llewellyn Hospital in Kitwe, where hundreds of children died every year, the recorded casualties of a desperate battle against history's nature and the implications of being black in Africa. It is a personal account written by the doctor who formulated the ideals behind the projects and the philosophy they were meant to sustain. A kind of Odyssey passing through the gates of imperial security into the realm of demands with no known cultural response, it is a journey from which there is no return and a task with no hope of accomplishment in the lifetime of a man.